Retro Gaming Hacks

Sega Genesis/MegaDrive

Many readers of this book probably remember the sheer exhilaration that we all felt when we saw Sonic the Hedgehog for the first time. The raw speed that the Sega Genesis console displayed was courtesy of nothing more than a 7.1 MHz Motorola 68000 processor—of the same sort you might have seen if you cracked open your early Apple Macintosh or Commodore Amiga (if you were lucky enough to own one of those beauties). As such, emulating a Genesis at full speed should not be too much to ask of a modern PC. Let’s install Gens, the best Genesis emulator available (which conveniently runs on Unix, the best OS available), and see what it can do.

Gentoo.

Gentoo users need to become root and then run the command emerge gens.

Other Linux distributions.

If you’re using another Unix or Linux distribution, check your installation media and online package repositories for a binary build of Gens. Otherwise, visit the Gens project’s Sourceforge downloads page (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=73619) and download the most recent tarball under the “Gens Source Code / Gens WIP linux” heading (as of this writing, it was named gens-rc3.tar.gz). Save the file to your /tmp directory.

Make sure you have GTK+ version 2.4 or greater installed, then proceed as for ZSNES (i.e., uncompress the tarball, change into the resulting directory, and do the ./configure && make && make install dance).

Once Gens is installed, using it is as easy as using ZSNES—just change to your Genesis ...